Fighting to Hold Damascus, Syria Flattens Rebel 'Slums'

DAMASCUS—All that remains of Abu Mohammed's ancestral home here in Syria's capital are two small adobe brick rooms and a few fig, loquat and mulberry trees.

It was bulldozed as part of a government slum-clearance program that appears to have a political motive: isolate neighborhoods sympathetic to Syria's armed insurrection, and then obliterate them, according to critics, human-rights groups and even some officials within the government itself. "We are like gypsies now," says Mr. Mohammed, who took his wife and...